where he regaled them with a good story
and the best of V. O. P. Scotch, and accepted their lavish bid to sit
with them awhile.

From this coign of vantage he had studied her sweet, serious, oval face
as she sat placidly reading a little volume in her lap, only once in a
while raising a pair of very dark, very beautiful, very heavily browed
and lashed brown eyes for brief survey of the forbidding landscape;
then, with never an instant's peep at him, dropping their gaze again
upon the book.

Not once in the long, hot afternoon had she vouchsafed him the minimum
of a show of interest, curiosity, or even consciousness of his presence.
Then the train made its second stop on account of the fires, and Bre'r
Rabbit his luckless break into the long monotony of the declining day.

Tentative spikes, clods, and empty flasks having failed to find him, the
beaters had essayed a skirmish line, and with instant result. Like a
meteoric puff of gray and white, to a chorus of yells and the
accompaniment of a volley of missiles, Jack had shot into space from
behind his shelter and darted zigzagging through the brush. A whizzing
spike, a chance shot that nearly grazed his nose, so dazzled his
brainlet that the terrified creature doubled on his trail and came
bounding back towards the train.

Close to the track-side ran a narrow ditch. In this ditch at the instant
crouched the tall lieutenant. Into this ditch leaped Bunny, and the next
second had whizzed past the stooping form and bored straight into a
little wooden drain. There some unseen, unlooked-for object blocked him.

Desperately the hind-legs kicked and tore in the effort to force the
passage, and with a shout of triumph the tall soldier swooped upon the
prize, seized the struggling legs, swung the wretched creature aloft,
and for the first time in six mortal hours met full in his own the gaze
of the deep, beautiful brown eyes he had so striven to attract, and they
were half pleading, half commanding for Bunny. The next instant,
uninjured, but leaping madly for life, Bre'r Rabbit was streaking
eastward out of harm's way, a liberated victim whose first huge leap
owed much of its length to the impetus of Stuyvesant's long, lean,
sinewy arm.

This time when he looked up and raised his cap, and stood there with his
blond hair blowing down over his broad white forehead, although the soft
curves of the ripe red lips at the window above him changed not, there
was something in the da